


Hallelujah

by justholdstill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 02:11:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11841801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdstill
Summary: In the aftermath of war and personal tragedy, our heroes find that going on with life is not as easy as they'd wish, and that seeking solace in one another is not such a bad idea after all.And remember when I moved in you?The holy dark was moving too,And every breath we drew was Hallelujah





	Hallelujah

**Author's Note:**

> The very first fic I ever published in the HP fandom, also way back in 2005.

**Hallelujah**

There are six swellings of dirt under the tremendous oak on the border of the woods, six swellings that by July have a soft stubble of daisies and violets. If Ron goes there at all he likes to go at sunrise when the sky is smudged greyish-yellow against the trees, when the hem of his trousers and his shoes get wet from dew, and sometimes he and Ginny go together and she plays a song she's been learning on her guitar.

Harry wakes up before the sun does, before Ron does, on those mornings - Ron doesn't know how Harry knows, only that he leaves a cup of hot tea in the kitchen for when Ron comes back. Sometimes Ron likes to drink it alone, but other times Harry makes some for himself and they discuss Quidditch scores.

They've been away, earlier in the summer - Harry took them to the sea and Ron refrained from drowning himself, was content instead to let himself be filled by the vast watery roar that left no room for other words. The house they rented let in the salt air and the rain, and on good days, the sun, but it was a good place, and a good time to be in it. Even so, the general definition of holiday suggested that it was only temporary, that they had to make their way back, eventually, to the house where the sound of the sea has nothing on the roaring of the silence.

It is then, on their return, that Ron discovers the link between time and sound. Time gets lost in the Burrow like it never used to; every now and then you have the paper with your breakfast, and you realize that it's not Monday after all but Thursday, that you haven't been to the oak tree in a while, that the milk in the refrigerator is sour and this is the fourth morning in a row Harry's put Firewhiskey in his coffee. Ron figures that without the punctuation of other people and their noise to provide your mind with something to hold on to, your hours are dictated by your body, between when you wake and when you sleep, and the way Ron's been sleeping lately it could be a very warm January for all he knows. It isn't as though he can call Harry a distraction - if the years of war have taught Harry anything, it's quiet; Ron half expects to come downstairs one day and find that Harry's gone to a monastary, had his head shaved and taken a vow of silence.

 

*

 

He goes into his mother's room and sits down on the bed. The quilt is a riot of yellows and greens and blues, nubbly under Ron's fingers. Outside the window, in a shrub with white flowers just past the sill, a drab little bird breaks forth with a sudden trill of song, making Ron forget for a moment that his father's robes are still hanging in the closet, that his mum's wiry hairs are still caught in the silver-backed brush on the bureau.  
He lies down to listen to the bird, and from his prone position the sky looks like a pleasantly blue well that he could fall into forever and forever.

After he's fallen asleep, that is where Harry finds him, his breathing deep and regular, and where Harry lies down too.

 

*

 

After Sirius dies, Harry says, "It's not important."

"It's not important" means that Harry has seen you staring at him in his grief, that he has seen the look in your eyes when you catch him coming out of the shower that you can't pretend is anything but want, that Harry doesn't care.

"It's not important" means that you get to kiss Harry in the dark, that you draw and redraw the lines of his body with your hands, all the while pretending that nothing is wrong, that groping like this is exactly what you've done since first year.

Harry says, "It's not important", but it is.

 

*

 

The moonlight cuts patient swaths through Ron's room in the night, steel through silk, and it's alright because Ron won't sleep for several hours yet anyway - he's too busy listening to Harry not crying. Harry doesn't cry, at least not in front of Ron or Ginny, and not, as far as Ron can tell, in his room in the wee morning hours. Yet while there's never any solid evidence, Harry gets this look sometimes, a look that's neither hard nor soft but makes his eyes look like a thunderstorm, an ocean. Harry of the Ocean Eyes has a way of getting nicely sloshed before you realize that's what he's doing, of making five consecutive beers seem like one. Harry of the Ocean Eyes has an invisible sword that rips through Ron's guts every time he looks at him.

That Harry gazes at Ron as though he might kiss him, but so far he never has.

Ginny knocks twice, then pushes the door open to look at Ron, sitting on the edge of his bed half-dressed, his torso strangely golden in the light from the doorway.

"Harry's drunk again," she says, and though her tone isn't at all condemning her mouth is sad.

"I could've been asleep, you know."

"But you aren't." It's hard to think that Ginny's only seventeen, that thin, pale stroke across her left shoulder describing the remnants of some death-eater's curse. She's very pretty now, in a strong sort of way, and very sure of what she wants, which is perhaps the reason Neville spends so many mornings drinking black coffee with them, not bothering to hide his love-bites anymore.

His sister crosses the space between them in her fuzzy purple bedroom slippers; Ron's mattress sinks a little further when she sits down next to him. He scrubs his hand across his face, suddenly, unreasonably reminded of opening his eyes to see Harry next to him that afternoon, a slumbering sprawl whose t-shirt was stretched just a little too much at the neck so that Ron could see a furtive expanse of brown-freckled collarbone. There's the clink of bottles knocking together, and Ron mutters, "That's the third time this week."

"He's been through a lot."

"Doesn't mean he can drink all my beer." There's something new and raw in this voice when he says this that makes Ginny turn her head to watch him, his fists curling and uncurling on his knees. He's a slow, sweltering burn of anger, a brushfire, but Ginny knows that on Ron, like this, angry has less to do with the beers that periodically disappear from the fridge and more to do with the black haired boy who drinks them, with why.

"He'll be okay," she whispers, standing and bending down to kiss him on the forehead where a certain scar might have been if she was kissing a certain person, "and so will you."

The door closes hard behind her. Ron listens.

 

*

 

In the dream Ron has sometimes, his house is underwater. He looks like himself but he has glasses and a scar like Harry's, and he swims through all the murky rooms in the Burrow, over and over, as if searching for something. Whatever it is, though, it isn't there, and when he goes outside with the intention of leaving, he finds that he isn't at home but at Hogwarts, out on the deliriously verdant lawn in the blinding sun. Harry's broom, the Firebolt, hovers beside him, so Ron does what seems logical - swings his leg over it and urges it into the air, heading in the direction of the Quidditch pitch. As he comes over a low crest of cloud and the pitch swings into sight, he can see a circle of people below him on the field, and he points the broom downward to fly into their midst. It turns to ash the minute he lands; Ron raises his head to look around him, realizing with a horrible acid feeling in his stomach that the people are dead - his mum, his dad, his brothers, dead - posed grotesquely as statues. There's not a mark on them, but a faint green glow emanates from the bodies, makes Ron feel heavy and sick. 

A gentle sobbing reaches his ears; his gaze finds Ginny in the Gryffindor box, weeping, clutching Ron's old stuffed bear, the one Fred and George once transfigured into a spider. When Ron turns to look at the bodies again, they've vanished, patches of dead grass marking where they stood, and Harry's standing just beyond the ring with a glass of wine in his hand, his expression apologetic.

"I'm sorry," he says, earnest and tragic, as if it's Harry who's killed them.

"I'm sorry," he says again, then flickers whitely as if a ghost, a Patronus, and is gone.

On some days, like this one, Ron wakes clawing at his sheets, the painful rush of a scream caught, soundless, in his throat.

 

*

 

"How're you feeling, mate?" Ron asks, spreading strawberry jam thickly over his toast. Harry has flung himself along the entire length of the shabby couch in the sitting room, and from the kitchen Ron can see that his hair is rumpled more wildly than usual and his eyes are bleary.

"Like a pack of fucking Hippogriffs ran over my head."

"Oh, good." There's a hole in the knee of Harry's pyjama trousers because Harry's never really given up the habit of dressing in handed-down things - it seems to Ron that Harry's never really given up anything in his life - not bitterness against the Dursley's, not his hatred of Voldemort, now dead (though that one is understandable), not even his schoolboy custom of living out of his trunk. 

Harry might be stationary now, a few months from the war, but in his mind, Ron reckons, he's as transient as ever.

Against his better judgement and also his underdeveloped sense of spite, Ron stirs a spoonful of hangover potion into some milky tea and gives it to Harry, who looks grateful and decidedly less wilted once he's had a few mouthfuls. He shoves Harry's feet off the end of the couch and sits there himself, munching quite peacefully on his toast.

After a while, his mug empty, Harry tucks his head onto his arm and begins to drift, the arch of his foot pressing Ron's outer thigh. Ron stays awake, though, ignoring the tender throb of Harry's pulse at his neck which makes his own throat hurt. He thinks of how it was half a year ago, fumbling, random, and breathlessly meaningful; occasionally Harry's tongue in Ron's mouth, occasionally Ron's hand in Harry's trousers, and once, when Ron had looked covertly at Harry in the showers, long thin bruises on Harry's hips, a sort of smutty graffitti:

_Ron Was Here._

An afternoon in April when it had stopped, less than two months before the end of the war, how the news had come that his family had been murdered, his parents, the twins in the joke shop, Charlie up in Edinburgh on business, Percy in his London flat. How Harry had held him after Ron punched the walls until his knuckles split and bled, how Harry pressed one kiss, roughly, against his hairline, almost hoping, Ron thought, that Ron wouldn't notice, but never again.

How Ron had taken up with Hermione for a short time again because he loved her and missed Harry and didn't really understand how anything worked.

They stay there, Stillness and Silence, like two mountains in the desert, rising up from the sand all around.

 

*

 

Bill owls from Marseille a week later to say that Fleur's had the baby, a little girl with pale red hair they're calling Elodie. Her middle name's going to be Molly; Bill thinks somehow their mum would have liked that, and Ron can't disagree.

Hermione floos in from Oxford later that day; she's going to be taking courses at the university there, Muggle subjects like English Literature and Art History and Advanced Calculus. Ron wonders aloud why her brain hasn't yet spontaneously combusted and Hermione replies that it's because she has more than two brain cells.

She worries over her cocoa that Harry isn't eating properly, compliments Ginny on her new haircut, and asks Ron, when it's just the two of them, how everything's been, so that Ron squints off into the distance and tries to think of an answer that's not a lie. Hermione isn't fooled - Ron was never very good at that - and puts her fingers through his hair like she did when they were together, kisses him high on his jaw, right below his ear.

"I loved you," says Ron thoughtfully, tracing the lines of her palm as if looking for an answer he knows isn't there, and he is reminded of how they lost their virginity together at the very beginning of seventh year when it dawned on them that they might die, how it wasn't very good but it was what they needed, and he kissed her softly, after.

"You still do," she tells him, letting him get away with the fact that he hasn't answered her question, and the brown eyes that survey him over the rim of her mug are wise. "Just not like that."

Ron's never been good at Divination either, but after Hermione goes he thinks to himself that the universe might be trying to tell him something. As he waves his wand and sets the dishes to washing, he allows himself to be troubled by the fact that he now forgets the outside world exists at all, that he is afraid of having to be a part of it again.

 

*

 

Early in September, the weather in Ottery St. Catchpole decides that it should do its best impression of torrential rain, and promptly sets about making the roads muddy, the gardens soggy, and the sky a desperate, wellington-boot gray.

Neville, with money from his new job at the Magical Flora Management branch of the Ministry, takes Ginny on a mini-break to the south of France, making a stop on the way to see baby Elodie. This leaves Ron, who forgets quite frequently that he has a new niece, alone in the company of Harry, who's been nursing a rather large bottle of vodka for the better part of two days.

As soon as they've gone, Ron takes all the alcohol that's left in the house - which amounts to a dusty bottle of wine from the cellar, three beers, and, for some reason, a flask of what smells like peach schnapps - and locks it in the pantry.

"We're out of beer," Harry says after a day, when he's something that passes for sober. He roots through the refrigerator again and comes up with half a pork chop leftover from last night's dinner.

"No, we're not. I've cut you off." Ron, who's at the table, calmly reading a book on the Cannons, doesn't look up. 

Harry turns an ugly shade of red and sputters for a moment - though Ron can see it coming for miles, he makes no move to defend himself when Harry's fist slants up across his cheekbone and eyebrow and then comes back to bloody his nose. Ron gasps in pain, and Harry seems startled, subdued by the sight of the vivid blood flower blooming on the front of Ron's shirt.

"I'm sorry," he whispers honestly, and it's just like in Ron's dream.

Ron drops to his knees and Harry drops with him. Neither one is suprised - though, perhaps, they should be - when Harry puts his hand behind Ron's head to kiss him more heartbreakingly than Ron's ever been kissed and they both taste copper.

 

*

 

They fall into it again as if it is nothing more than an old, comfortable habit. As if what they do every afternoon is lie in the tall green-glinting grass of the garden and decide to take off their trousers, as if Ron's hollow chant of Harry's name is as indigenous as the hollyhocks and that thrush on the fence.

The night before Ginny comes back, Harry conjures a hundred candles and lights them all in Ron's room.

 

*

 

The last candle gutters and smokes rebelliously before Harry manages to blow it out, then sends up indolent blue swells that dissipate on contact with the cool air coming in the open window. The darkness pours in around them, nudging faces into shadow, amplifies the sound of buttons and zips being undone, of trousers and jumpers dropped to the floor. Ron bites down on Harry's bottom lip as Harry crashes them into the bed; they might have candles and pretense, but the reckless way they glide along each other is just as graceless and hasty as ever. Theirs is a sort of puppetry, where a callused thumb sliding along the furrow of a hip, where lips that just glance the corner of a mouth mean at once victory and surrender.

It's almost not real, to drag his finger down Harry's spine so that Harry arches up and back against him, so that when Ron catches a sudden spastic breath, the air redolent of fragrant warm wax and smoke, he is reminded abruptly of a Muggle cathedral he had once been to with his mother in London. 

It feels oddly religious to have Harry splayed under him like this on his bedspread gone soft with age, making a mockery of patience; it makes their bodies holy, their fucking holy, the convulsive, sticky way they come holy.

Hallelujah, thinks Ron, resting his head in the sweaty spot between Harry's shoulderblades and panting, just a little.

 

*

 

Hermione comes just on the cusp of winter, bringing, among her other things, an antique Wedgewood tea service, because her mother's decided that this is the closest Hermione's going to come to marriage. They have a good laugh at that, but all the same when Ron uses it he feels mildly guilty, as though he's making a promise he won't keep.

She knows as soon as she has them in a room together, looks from one to the other, then when Harry's gone upstairs, asks, "are you-?"

"Yeah," Ron says.

"I'm glad."

"I-," says Ron, wondering for a feverish moment if he can tell Hermione that he loves Harry because he can't tell Harry that, but he thinks better of it.

"Yeah," he says again.


End file.
